“…we clattered under the gate arch into Narbo Martius, and found the place thrumming like a bee swarm with the crows pouring in to the horse fair. It must have been a file place once, one could see that even now; the walls of the forum and basilica still stood up proudly above the huddle of reed thatch and timber, with the sunset warm on peeling plaster and old honey-colored stone; and above the heads of the crowds the air was full of the darting of swallows who had their mud nests under the eaves of ever hut and along every ledge and acanthus-carved cranny of the half-ruined colonnades…” That’s from an early chapter, describing a visit to the horse fair at present-day Narbonne. Another chapter describes the arrival of Artos and his companions at Hadrian’s Wall.

“It must have been a fine sight in its day, the Wall, when the sentries came and went along the rampart walks and bronze-mailed cohorts held the fortress towers and the altars to the Legion’s gods were thick along the crest; and between it and the road and the vallum ditch that followed it like its own shadow … the towns were as dead as the Wall, now, for the menace of the North was too near, the raids too frequent for them to have outlived the protection of the Eagles; and we rode into a ghost town, the roofs long since fallen in and the walks crumbling away, the tall armies of nettles where the merchants had spread their wares and the Auxiliaries had taken their pleasure in off-duty hours, where the married quarters had been, and children and dogs had tumbled in the sunshine under the very feet of the marching cohorts, and the drink shops had spilled beery song into the night, and the smiths and sandalmakers, the horse dealers and the harlots had plied their trades; and all that moved was a blue hare among the fallen gravestones of forgotten men, and above us a hoodie crow perching on the rotting carcass of what had once been one of the great catapults of the Wall, that flew off croaking with a slow flap of indignant wings as we drew near…”

Sutcliff’s revisioning of King Arthur as Artos, the half-British, half-Roman cavalry commander, with his company of fighting horsemen – spelled out to me what it could be like; selling your lives dear to hold back the darkness for just a little longer, a long fight in twilight among crumbling ruins, with men and women who half-remembered the ways and habits of an older age. Sutcliff’s Artos and his comrades – they picked their hill, their Badon Hill and made their stand. They valued those ways and the memories of those institutions handed down, more than they valued their own lives, for living under the yoke of barbarian raiders … meant nothing at all. Better to die on your feet as free men and women, than live in chains … and to make the choice while it is yours to make.

From Gilbert & Sullivan’s Princess Ida

I suppose that one of the most enjoyable things about romping in the halls of historical research is getting to know people, some of whom are famous and others notorious, all of them interesting and they tickle my interest to the point where I would have very much liked to have met some of them personally. Sam Houston is one of them in Texas history that I’d have loved to meet, Jack Hays another, Angelina Eberly a third. I would have loved to have met Queen Elizabeth I of England – three of the four are complicated people, as nearly as I can judge from reading accounts of them. I just would have liked to have had the chance to form my own, independently-arrived at opinion, you see. About the only way that I can indulge this curiosity is to work them up as characters for various books – walk-on parts, usually. Assemble the various views, take a look at some known writing of theirs, consult the grave and sober historians and come up with something that I hope will be revealing, true to the historical facts, and at least a jolly good read … but now and again, in the pages of history, I those that I don’t like very much at all. Some of them are so immediately disagreeable, dislikeable and all-unpleasant that I marvel they lived long enough to make a mark in history at all.

Ah, well – the Muse of History records mercilessly and without particular favor … although she does seem to favor the literate and those with a basic grasp of favorable marketing. She will have her ways with her humble devotees.

The historical character which I developed such an immediate and thoroughgoing dislike for was one John Robert Baylor: he is not the Baylor that Baylor University is named after. That Baylor was his uncle, Robert Emmett Bledsoe Baylor; a dedicated and relatively harmless Baptist minister, judge and politician, as well a co-founder of the university. John Baylor was another and completely unappetizing kettle of fish entirely. He managed – in the middle of the Civil War – to be sacked from his relatively high and responsible position as the Confederate Governor of Arizona Territory, and to have his commission as an officer in the Confederate Army revoked. I read about him first in Alvin Josephy’s The Civil War in the American West, where the action that he proposed in time of war was considered to be so vile and unacceptable to Jefferson Davis and the Confederate high command … that he instantly became a military untouchable. What could have been so horrible, so beyond the limits of what was considered acceptable in fighting for the Confederacy that it cost Baylor so dearly?

To begin to grasp an explanation one need to know a little about Baylor. Like many of his contemporaries in Texas, he had come there as a relatively young man of eighteen years, after the death of his Army surgeon father. In 1840, John Baylor and his brother settled on a farm near LaGrange owned by their uncle. Almost immediately he began participating in the local mounted militia company, defending the settlers against constant, bloody raids by Comanche Indians. The depredations of the Comanche on the Anglo settlers and Mexican alike were horrific – sufficient indeed to engender a considerable amount of hatred for them on the part of those who fought against them. But Baylor’s unvarnished and indiscriminant hatred of Indians seems to have been extreme even among his fellow militiamen and Rangers. Texians frequently depended upon Indian allies such as the Tonkawa, the Cherokee and the Delaware. A fair number of them observed the distinctions between tribes, divisions and even individuals, inclined to walk the path of peace and those who were not. Sam Houston himself was especially a partisan of the Cherokee, John O. Meusebach, leader among the German settlements along the frontier even negotiated a successful peace treaty between his settlers and the Southern, or Penateka Comanche. Robert Neighbors worked tirelessly to ensure the safety and security of such individuals and bands who were willing to follow the Cherokee example to settle down, and John ‘Rip’ Ford recruited fighters among the Tonkawa, Anadarko and Shawnee for an 1858 punitive expedition into the heart of Comancheria.

But John Baylor was of a different ilk – and not just because of a couple of narrow escapes. He arrived too late for the great Plum Creek fight, where companies of Rangers and mounted militiamen ambushed Buffalo Hump and his Penateka band after the sack of Linville. And he was a member of Nicholas Mosby Dawson’s company, come from La Grange in answer to Mathew ‘Old Paint’ Caldwell’s plea for volunteers to beat back the Mexican Army expedition which briefly took San Antonio in 1842. John Baylor somehow became separated from the main body of Dawson’s men, and so was not there when Dawson’s company was overrun and all but exterminated by the retreating Mexican force. Upon that narrow escape, he settled for a while in Oklahoma Territory, at Fort Gibson and took a job as a teacher – but it didn’t last long. He was charged as an accomplice when his brother-in-law murdered a local Indian trader, and hopped it back to Texas. By 1851 he had settled down somewhat to a life of farming and ranching, married and was elected to the legislature. In mid-decade, Baylor was appointed as Indian Agent to those Comanche who had settled on the Clear Fork Reservation. It was not a successful appointment, for he clashed bitterly and constantly with his supervisor, Robert Neighbors, who had long been a champion of Indians and had worked tirelessly to defend them. Baylor also accused several of the Reservation Indians of conniving with their non-settled brethren in carrying out raids. The area around the Reservation on the Clear Fork was rich land and was becoming settled by white men. When they were raided by Comanche, they blamed the Reservation Indians; some accounts have it that the raiders were quite pleased to leave tracks and evidence framing the Reservation Indians. On being relieved as Indian agent, Baylor took up an anti-Indian crusade; he traveled extensively across the settlements of Northern Texas, preaching hatred of Indians … all Indians, regardless of tribe or peaceful intent. He edited an anti-Indian newspaper and recruited vigilantes. He feuded viciously with Robert Neighbors and campaigned for his replacement and Indian Agent.

Late in December, seventeen peaceful Anadarko and Caddo Indians were attacked by white vigilantes as they slept. Although identified by name, the murderers were never tried. By 1859 it was clear that the Clear Fork Indians would be slaughtered if they remained in Texas and Baylor was chiefly responsible for the situation, in continuing to throw rhetorical kerosene on an already blazing bonfire. Those surviving Indians on the Clear Fork Reservation were evacuated to a new reserve in Indian Territory. Robert Neighbors and three companies of Federal troops accompanied them there. On his return, Robert Neighbors went to file his report on the matter at Fort Belknap, and was murdered there by a local man who disagreed with Neighbor’s advocacy of the Indian’s rights.

John Baylor doubtless felt himself vindicated. With secession and the fortunes of the new Confederate States riding high, he shortly found himself as the commander of the Second Texas Rifles, with a mission to secure the overland route to the west. In short order he had captured Mesilla, forced the surrender of Union troops at Fort Fillmore, and established the Confederate Territory of Arizona, with himself as governor. It was one of whose early Confederate victories which gave overwhelming overconfidence to those who had championed secession and the military virtues of the Southern cavalier … but very soon, Baylor ran into trouble. He might have gotten the Union soldiers to surrender easily enough, but his old bête noir – Indians – were another matter. The various Apache tribes were every bit as adept at warfare as the Comanche. At the start of the war, an outbreak of Apache raids had forced the Butterfield Stage line to cease operations. The Apache were in no way inclined to make common cause with the Confederacy against the Union, on the principle of an enemy of an enemy being a friend. The Union Army had all but withdrawn from that part of the southwest. Impulsive, proud and intemperate in deeds and words, Baylor does not seem the kind of man who could deal tactfully and efficiently with a fluid and complicated situation. Proof of that is in what happened when Robert P. Kelley the pro-Confederate editor of the Mesilla Times criticized him repeatedly in in a series of articles. Baylor took violent exception – so violent that it came to physical blows. Kelley was so badly injured in this frank exchange of opinions that he died as a result of them, some days later.

But there is more. Baylor’s command was so harassed by Apache raids and by their inability to do anything effective about them, that he wrote a letter to one of his subordinates, directing him to take certain actions against the Apaches. “I learn that the Indians have been to your post for the purpose of making a treaty,” Baylor wrote. “The Congress of the Confederate States have passed a law declaring extermination of all hostile Indians. You will therefore use all means to persuade the Apaches or any tribe to come in for the purpose of making peace, and when you get them together, kill all the grown Indians and take the children prisoners and sell them to defray the expense of killing the Indians.” There were also reports of Baylor ordering that poisoned foodstuffs be given to Indians – but the contents of this letter became known to Jefferson Davis and his government. They had never ordered any such actions be taken, and as far as is known none of his orders with respect to exterminating Apache Indians were carried out. But the scandal was immense; as a matter of record, Davis had been trying for allies among the Oklahoma Indian tribes. Baylor was sacked from his office as military governor and his officer’s commission revoked. He appealed the decision, but Davis stood his ground.

Baylor did return to Texas, where he was later elected to the Second Confederate Congress. He served the remainder of the war as a private, regaining a commission only at the end of it. He ended his days as a rancher, near Montell, Texas. He ran unsuccessfully for the office of governor in the 1870s … which seems to have been a fortunate decision on the part of the voters. He continued to have a reputation as a man with a violent temper; he is supposed to have killed a man in a feud over livestock and been involved in at least one gunfight. Surprisingly, he lived to the age of 71 and died of natural causes.
(Cross posted at my book blog, and at Chicagoboyz.net)

Diana Oughton – like Mr. Ayers and some of his other confreres – came from an embarrassingly well-to-do family. They pleased and amused themselves four decades ago by messing around with violent revolution, bank robbery and the inexpert assembly of high-explosive devices, presumably for the benefit of the working class, the poor, the proletariat, or whatever Marxist euphemism it pleased them to label the recipients of their beneficence. The bomb, which exploded prematurely in March of 1970 in a Greenwich Village townhouse, was made of roofing nails and dynamite stuffed into a length of water pipe; the intended target was a dance at the Fort Dix NCO club.

Wrap your mind around that for a moment: a bomb, intended to kill as many military NCOs and their dates as possible. This was the time of the draft of American males, and so a fair number of the military personnel targeted may assume to have been men, of sufficient expertise (however unwillingly they might have begun their career in the military) to have had achieved NCO status. Which is no mean thing; generally in the American military, NCOs are the ones who keep things going, who know where everything is, and the really good ones are tapped into a network of their peers, who maintain a kind of equality among themselves. It is an equality of mutual ability and respect, a web of obligation and professional courtesy. It keeps the whole thing running – this network of NCOS. They are just high enough up on the ladder to have responsibility, control and a great deal of latitude in carrying out their duties. Officers have professional responsibility and oversight; but the saying was in the Air Force was that the NCOs ran the place and the officers just thought they did. These are the people that Bill Ayers and his merry band of Weathermen wanted to kill, although I am sure that they told themselves it was because they were part of the war-making machinery behind the popular establishment.

The NCOs of the larger world – they are the middle class. They are the skilled those who do, the hustlers, who have their hands on the control levers day to day, no matter if they work for themselves, or a larger enterprise. They are a little up from the factory floor, but not in the corner office. They are the owners of small businesses, or working supervisors, as the Air Force professional literature used to describe it. The middle class: not the dependent proles, a thin hair and a paycheck away from disaster, with little leisure or income to spare on the larger matters of the mind, culture or community. They are also not the officer class, the upper classes, with a comfortable cushion of income and property, or even the aristocratic class. Come what may, our American aristocratic class has the means of riding out whatever economic storms may come.

And one way or another, our American aristocratic class in the media and intellectual circles seem to hate the middle class. Hate them, despise them with every fiber of their being; the ostensible reason is for being square, dull, conforming, suburban hypocrites, (although as a member of the NCO suburban middle class I haven’t found much of that dreaded and much-advertised power-to-conformity on offer. Maybe I just live in the wrong suburbs, but I have never found it so, anywhere I lived since childhood). The working middle class and slightly-above-them supervisory-middle-class and independent-business-owner middle class are also roundly condemned by all the right-thinking intelligentsia for having things, and wanting to live in detached houses with a bit of yard, for liking the utility of large motor vehicles, for wanting to make their own decisions about who they live next to, the schools their children go to, their religious beliefs.

Our would-be aristocrats hate the middle class for all kinds of offenses, although I suspect that the real crime of the middle class is our failure to be biddable, and because we are absolutely essential to a well-adjusted and functioning democracy. The substantial and prosperous middle classes built creative and technologically advanced societies throughout Western Europe, starting with the Dutch and the English, and moving on to America, to the disgust and dismay of aristocrats – and that includes the traditional blood aristocrats, and the new kind from the 20th century, whose will to power over their fellow citizens knows no bounds. The independent middle class was then and is now most certainly a threat to the power exercised by aristocrats of the blood and the ideology. One can’t help but notice that in the grim swathe cut across Russia, Cuba, Eastern Europe, Africa, Cuba, Cambodia and South America by the ideological fathers of the Weather Underground, the first order of business was the destruction of the successful middle class … either by impoverishing them utterly, or actual physical destruction.

Oh, the new aristocratic class – no matter what they call themselves, or how they justify their ideology and their actions – at the core of it is their own conviction that all power should reside in the hands of the elite, the aristocrats, themselves. It’s the same old will to power, to have authority over others … and the middle class stands in the way. Gut the middle class; destroy the American republic as we know it. To destroy the republic; reduce the middle class – it’s as easy as that. And that is why I despise Bill Ayers and his fellow travelers: They were never for the people … they were only for themselves as the new aristocrats, draped in revolutionary theory, instead of purple robes.
(crossposted at www.chicagoboyz.net)

3 Years Old – Under President Eisenhower, Celia stays home with her younger brother, as her full-time work-at-home Mom helps her get ready for school by reading aloud to her, supervising her playtime and providing a secure home environment. She will join thousands of students across the country who will start kindergarten ready to learn and succeed.

17 Years Old – Under President Nixon, Celia takes the SAT and is on track to begin applying for college … which college program includes two years at a local junior college capped by two years at a state university – a public university system that the taxes paid by Celia’s parents over the years have subsidized. The public high school which Celia attends is in a working-class suburb, but offers academically enriched courses for those students who qualify for them.

18 Years Old – Under President Nixon, as she prepares for her first semester of college, Celia lives at home, and works a summer job to pay for the minimal tuition and books required for her college courses – and also for a student bus pass on the rapid transit network supported by the taxes that her parents have paid over the years. Celia and her parents wouldn’t dream of applying for an Opportunity Tax Credit or a Pell Grant to bring a college education within reach.

20 Years Old – Under President Ford, Celia has her wisdom teeth removed. This is paid for by her parent’s health insurance, which her father has through his work. The administration of President Ford has little or nothing to do with this.

22 Years Old – Under President Carter, Celia completes two years at the state university which has been supported by the taxes that her parents and grandparents have paid for decades. She lives at home with her parents, and works a part-time job to pay for tuition and books. She graduates with no student loan debt, federal or otherwise. In fact, Celia has a surplus from her job of approximately $1,500, sufficient to allow her to spend the summer in England on the cheap.

Celia enlists in the U.S. Air Force and trains as a public affairs/military broadcast technician, for a military salary, standards of work and chances of promotion which are equal to those of male public affairs/military broadcast technicians.

25 Years Old – Under President Carter, Celia has worked full-time as a military broadcast specialist. Thanks to military medical care, birth control and preventive care are available. And thanks to military personnel assignment policies and requirements, her significant other is stationed 3,000 miles away, making such birth control and preventive care superfluous. Celia focuses on her work rather than worry about her health – although now and again, she worries about not getting many letters from him.

31 Years Old – Under President Reagan, Celia has been promoted to E-5, and is earning enough to afford after-school child-care for her daughter; child care which she locates on her own, and pays for fully out of her own pocket, unassisted by any federal program or subsidy … other than military pay and allowances. Celia’s daughter attends DODDS schools, which are very highly thought of in educational circles and do not need any help from a program called ‘Race to the Top.’

38 Years Old – Under President Clinton, Celia purchases a small suburban house on a 25-year mortgage, with the assistance of the GI Bill … which was established for military veterans at the close of World War II. Necessary appliances and renovations to the house are paid for entirely out of funds Celia had saved for that purpose.

42 Years Old – Under President Clinton, Celia retires from the military at 20 years time in federal service, having – depending on the station, assignment and duty requirements – usually worked 60-80 hours weekly and been on call for those hours not actually on the job. She retires with a military pension of half her base pay, amounting to approximately one-forth of her military income. As payment on the house takes up approximately two-thirds of that pension payment, it is necessary for Celia to work at a full-time job for the next eight years. As for medical and dental care, Celia pays into the Tricare Prime program.

49 Years Old – Under President Bush, Celia goes into partnership with the owner of a small local publishing firm, who has never taken any kind of loan or participated in any Small Business Administration program. Celia also begins writing historical novels, and freelancing as a writer and editor, which activities bring in a small but adequate income from the private sector to supplement the military pension. No government program is involved in this.

67 Years Old – Under President ???, Celia will pay off the last of the mortgage on the house, and also be eligible to collect Social Security … a program which Celia has paid into for all of her working life, civilian and military. However, Celia is not holding her breath on actually being able to collect Social Security or any portion thereof, no matter what the politicians pledge or promise. In fact, Celia is assuming that she will continue working as a small publisher and freelance writer until the day that she drops.

So … umm. Nice try, President Obama. Next!!!

(Cross-posted at Chicagoboyz.net)

Sauerkraut, red potatoes and nice little sausages from the best meat market in New Braunfels, all cooked up in the same pan, make a darned tasty meal. (The recipe is on my book blog, under “The Splendid Table” page. No, seriously – good eats. I’ve begun to wonder, tasting the glories of home-made cheese, how good are the pickles that we have canned, and the sauerkraut which will eventually emerge from the canning kettle.)
Anyway – the news is it’s usual bounty of the richly comic:

Like Professor Elizabeth Warren, who looks like an older version of a Bund Deutcher Madel recruiting poster (League of German Maidens, the female version of the Hitler Youth) claiming to be 1/32 Cherokee Indian … ok, then. Now and again, I met people who told me they were part whatever American Indian. A fair number of them were blue-eyed blonds, which led me to assume that … certain physical traits must have been pretty darned recessive. Even if my friend Esther T. who was one-eighth Shoshone did look like Geronimo got up in drag as a Wagnerian soprano. So who’s really a minority, when you look at first glance like a member of the majority class? Oh, and I won’t even get into how the head of the NAACP, Benjamin Jealous is almost a dead-spit look-alike to my brother J.P. – who in spite of having dark hair and brown eyes and used to tan very easily … is a person of unmixed pallor, Anglo-Saxon and protestant descent for as far back as family records go. Seriously. But honestly, how seriously can you take this s**t these days?

I see where some Occupy Whatever doofuses had a plot to blow up a bridge. But they didn’t have the wit to see that all their needs for explosives were being met by surprisingly helpful FBI informants. I am being reminded of those dear sweet days in the late 60s and early 70s, when law enforcement alphabet agencies made up a substantial portion of the membership of so many of these fringe little groups with violent inclinations. Apparently, they were the only ones willing to come to tedious meetings and reliably pay their dues. I kid, I kid.

And now that all the jollies have been wrung out of President Obama’s boyhood proclivities for chowing down on chow (and hound, and peke and collie), I guess now it’s time to make fun of his composite girlfriends. Seriously, he had girlfriends, composite or individual? My impression was that he was too much in love with himself to get involved with an outsider, but OK … You know, after a certain point, when enough stuff has been composited, created, massaged and shaped, you may as well call it fiction, not a memoir.
And that’s my week. Working up a piece to accompany the administrations latest bit of work “The Life of Julia” will call for a separate entry of it’s own.

(links below – somehow the posting of embedded links on this blog is frelled beyond redemption.)

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/edit/a.3037076371979.2121366.1415091659/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_German_Girls

http://celiahayes.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/one-pan-wurst-supper/